We’re at the forefront of the data revolution, committed to building the world’s greatest data and applications platform. Our ‘get it done’ culture allows everyone at Snowflake to have an equal opportunity to innovate on new ideas, create work with a lasting impact, and excel in a culture of collaboration.
Founded by industry experts and backed by strategic investors, our disruptive built-for-the-cloud architecture was designed to push the limitations of conventional data warehousing.
Our teams breed ambition, challenge ordinary thinking, push the pace of innovation, in-service of the exploding demand for accessible data.
Snowflake is growing fast and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We’re passionate about our people, our customers, our values and our culture! We’re also looking for people with a growth mindset and the pragmatic insight to solve for today while building for the future. And as a Snowflake employee, you will be accountable for supporting and enabling diversity and belonging.
Snowflake started with a clear vision: make modern data warehousing effective, affordable, and accessible to all data users. Because traditional on-premises and cloud solutions struggle with this, Snowflake developed an innovative product with a new built-for-the-cloud architecture that combines the power of data warehousing, the flexibility of big data platforms, and the elasticity of the cloud at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions.
FoundationDB (FDB) is Snowflake’s metadata database and a critical component of Snowflake’s service. FDB performs millions of transactions per second across thousands of processes. The FDB team builds features on open-source FDB that improve the performance, scale, reliability and operability of the product.
We are looking for an outstanding performance engineer to join the team and improve FDB performance, scalability, and reliability along with Snowflake’s constantly growing needs for a faster and larger database.
As a Performance Engineer on this team, you will:
- Analyze FDB performance, scale, operability, and recommend and develop improvements in FDB.
- Analyze production workloads, and develop synthetic workloads, chaos workloads and benchmarks.
- Design and implement automated testing, monitoring, and results for the above workloads
- Develop tools to profile performance at runtime e.g. perf, eBPF, kernel tracking, flame graphs.
- Investigate new execution hardware, new lifecycle management tools
- Evangelize best practices in database usage and end-to-end architecture.
- Participate in the design and implementation of next generation systems
- Provide detailed and constructive design and code review.
An ideal candidate will have:
- 8+ years hands-on software engineering experience.
- BS/MS/PhD in computer science (or equivalent)
- Expertise in identifying and analyzing performance bottlenecks
- Solid understanding of OS and systems concepts like process management, concurrency, memory management, IO patterns, file systems, block storage devices, etc.
- Work experience in cloud environments like AWS, Azure, GCP
- Ability to work effectively both autonomously and in teams
- Strong technical problem solving, communication, and collaboration skills
- Excitement by the challenge of hard technical problems
- Intense curiosity and willingness to question
Bonus points:
- Familiarity with C++ 11 and onwards (C++14, C++17, C++20 is double bonus)
- Good working knowledge of Linux / Unix OSes
- Experience with continuous integration and automation frameworks e.g. experience with Jenkins, Kubernetes is great!
- Have worked on performance analysis for databases
- Knowledge of KeyValue, NoSQL, SQL databases, database storage engines
- Understanding of relational database concepts and SQL
- Experience working on open source projects
About Snowflake:
About FoundationDB: